A couple of years back, so many people haven't even heard of artificial intelligence (AI) but today, it's on the lips of everyone (or at least most people). Chatgpt is actually what made AI to be popular and we all saw how everything AI-related started growing exponentially after Chatgpt launched but the funny thing is that AI has been existing for years but just recently started gaining popularity, thanks to Chatgpt.
When Chatgpt launched, there were lots of concerns that it will end up replacing a lot of jobs and I shared similar concerns too when I saw its features for the first time. Things became worse when Gpt-4 launched and the AI model was taken to a whole different level. One thing that raised concerns with this AI boom is that it's going to replace a lot of jobs in the tech industry.
When I mean tech, I'm talking about things like coding, graphics design, and other tech-related fields, including content creation, all forms of writing (technical, copy, creative), etc. Take for example writing; before things like chatgpt and Google Bard, people paid writers who deliver contents for their blogs, companies, or brands. But today, anyone can easily jump onto one of those AI platforms and generate whatever article they want.
To be honest, I'm worried about the way artificial intelligence is growing because I'm also in the tech field, and like I said earlier, some of the jobs that AI will replace (already replacing) are those in the tech field. I hope to get a job in the future as a programmer but the possibility of that happening is getting slimmer every day as AI keeps getting better. For now, large language models (LLMs) like chatgpt can only do basic coding, but won't it become more advanced in let's say 5 years from now?
What else can I do?
Most of the skills I have are tech-related but the one thing I can fall back to when AI takes over the labor market is what I'm currently studying in school; aquaculture. Aquaculture is a wide area and it goes beyond just rearing aquatic organisms. A lot of people in Nigeria are into fish farming and it simply just requires them to get a piece of land, put together a couple of rearing facilities, get fish fingerlings, and start feeding them until they get to table size.
Seems easy enough, right? But yet, a lot of people still fail at this line of business if they don't involve an expert (like me 😉). When it comes to fish farming, people tend to ignore one very lucrative aspect; fish fry production. Why? Because it's very risky. It involves getting a male and female fish, inducing the female to lay eggs, fertilizing the eggs with milt from the male, incubating the fertilized eggs, and taking care of the fry or hatchlings (the newly hatched fish).
The picture below is of one-week old hatchlings from the spawning that one of my friends demonstrated for the 300 level students of aquaculture. You might no see them clearly because they are very tiny.
The steps might look pretty straight forward but each of those steps is very risky because just a slight mistake will lead to total failure of the whole thing. And if there's one thing we all know: high risk leads to high rewards (or high failure) and this is why fish fry production is the most lucrative aspect of fish farming and it's currently my area of specialty in aquaculture and also what my final year project is based on.
Aside from fish fry production, I can also go into ornamental fish production and post-harvest. There are a lot of opportunities in aquaculture which doesn't require going out to look for a job, you can just be your own boss. Some of my lecturers in this area of aquaculture (they all have their specialties) take between 100k to 200k naira just for one fish spawning session which doesn't take more than 24 hours. They go to fish farms and help them produce fish fry and they get paid for it.
As I said earlier, a lot of fish farmers fail because they don't involve an expert in their business and since 300 level, I have been going to fish farms to help farmers with issues they have and I get paid for my time. I haven't even graduated and I'm already making money from this 😁. The funny thing is that sometimes I do a job that doesn't make me break a sweat and I still get paid handsomely.
My main goal is still programming because aquaculture is a very stressful field and requires a lot of hard work but the problem is that I'm a very lazy person 😅 I prefer using my brain to do the heavy lifting rather than depending on my physical strength and programming is one of those fields where a lot of brainpower is required, rather than physical strength.
But a lot of people are of the opinion that AI won't take the jobs of programmers because there are still a lot of things it can't do and that's actually true, there are a lot of programming problems which AI can't solve...for now. Also, there are a lot of areas under programming and some are more susceptible to getting replaced by AI than others, so I can simply just switch from web development (the field I'm currently in) to something like the artificial intelligence field itself and machine learning; let me be one of the people working on AI too 😉
Thanks for reading
Connect with me on:
Twitter: @kushyzeena
Readcash: @kushyzee
Edited with Canva
First image: Image by Freepik
Second image: personal picture
Third image: Image by wirestock on Freepik